COMPSCI5092 Research and Professional Skills

The investigation is about understaffing of carers in a healthcare facility. Carers are some of the health workers who provide care to the patients while they are in hospital. Understaffing of carers is one of the challenges to providing an effective nursing care. What’s more, it leads to severe consequences. Even though understaffing s a common occurrence in nursing homes, regulations regarding nursing homes are in place and play the essential role of protecting the helpless residents at risk of facing neglect and abuse. As such, some nursing homes with fewer staffs or sometimes unqualified staff may receive fines for such violations.

Inadequate staffing in nursing homes is likely to cause tragedies, sometimes amounting to medical errors, bed sores, or even deadly falls. In circumstances characterized by caregiver shortage, a staff is forced to prioritize some duties over the others. It therefore implies that some responsibilities have to be overlooked, such as prevention of infections, managing and controlling accident hazards, focusing on the sanitary conditions and improving resident of the well-being. Understaffing of carers is therefore perceived to reduce the standard of care, thus putting the residents at risk. Also, studies have revealed that a good ration of staff to residents improves the quality of care and health among the residents.

The investigation will be about the importance of staff to resident ratio. Most of the nursing homes are staffed on the basis of resident to staff ratio or vice versa. Fewer residents assigned to each staff reduces the chances of the staff being overwhelmed. The study also aims to investigate some of the most essential but neglected tasks when there are understaffing in nursing homes.

The eventual outcome

The eventual outcome of the study should be able to assess the consequences of understaffing in nursing homes. As such, the consequences of understaffing have to be measured with much focus neglected tasks such as the rate at which residents are adjusted while preventing bed sores, checking the patient while documenting the health changes, ensuring the residents are clean and preventing infection, and finally the rate at which dangerous falls are preventing by assisting the residents in their movements. Also, the outcomes will be measured by the stress level among the staff members and the rate at which they are upset for lacking the ability to provide quality care to their patients. Finally, the outcomes will be measures through staff burnouts. Staff who face burnouts usually move on to better paying jobs in hospitals. Since there are high turnover rate in these nursing homes, there is always a rush to hire new employees, some of which may be unqualified and usually fail to attend critical training period.  

Doing the investigation

The study will adopt a quantitative approach, ensuring that the staff experiences are quantified in measuring various outcomes. In providing such a quantitative information, the study will make use of questionnaire in assessing all the carers in the nursing home. The questionnaire will assess various aspects that relate to their work such as the tasks the frequently do and those that they do not, the frequency at which they prevent bed sore, the rate at which they prevent infections, the rate at which they prevent dangerous falls and assist the patients in moving.

Consent

Informed consent will be sought from the residents, carers in the nursing homes, the manager of the nursing home, the administration or any government authority in the area before commencing the study. The study participants will review and understand the informed consent form before signing.

Ethics: Confidentiality and privacy

The informed consent form signed by all the study participants will capture some of the necessary components such as how the study will ensure their privacy and the confidentiality of the data provided. In preventing the study participant identity from being discovered by others, the identity will be confidential (Hartigan et al 2018; Keshta and Odeh, 2020). The record relevant to the study will be kept secure by using passwords to prevent external access. Such information will be encrypted while sending over the internet. The researcher will also record the information in manner that limits linking the subject response with any identifying information. Privacy of the study subjects will be ensured by making them anonymous.

Issues, problems and outcomes of understaffing

Understaffing remains to be one of the challenges in nursing care homes and leads to various negative health consequences such as increased falls, increased bed sores, increased disease infection to the residents. Also, nursing homes with understaffed carers are likely to cause staff burnouts, thus making them seeking other jobs.

Recommendations

It’s recommended to have one carer serving between 7 to eight residents, thus solving all the negative health consequences related to understaffing.

References

Hartigan, L., Cussen, L., Meaney, S. and O’Donoghue, K., 2018. Patients’ perception of privacy and confidentiality in the emergency department of a busy obstetric unit. BMC health services research, 18(1), pp.1-6.

Keshta, I. and Odeh, A., 2020. Security and privacy of electronic health records: Concerns and challenges. Egyptian Informatics Journal.

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